i recently learned about the buddhist concent of dependent origination, which states that all phenomena arise in dependence with other phenomena. this was surprisingly similar to my idea of dialectical materialism, and it got me thinking about how buddhism could be reconciled/combined with a marxist world view. has anybody here read books or articles on this topic?
obviously not everything buddhists believe (reincarnation is an obvious example) is going to jive with marxism but that doesn’t mean it’s worthless to try to analyze one in terms of the other
Death to America
It’s definitely a religion and most religious institutions are going to have some problematic aspects. Not that I know more than you, but I think there’s some value and hopefully it will adopt a more proletarian character. Many people just want something to put all their trust in to make them feel safe and promise to relieve their suffering. As Marxists we should maintain a critical attitude and investigate things for ourselves through practice (something which the dharma is hypothetically compatible with). Maybe it’s just me being a westoid, but I see Buddhism as a critical way to understand your own mind and experience.
I understand. I think there is value in some of the practices like mindfulness meditation, and some of the teachings. It’s just for me those on their own aren’t Buddhism anymore. For example, breath awareness meditation was the most basic meditation to develop the attention required to sustain the more advanced meditations in Tendai. But maybe other people have different experiences - I know Tendai incorporates a lot of esoteric practices, which were the main thing I struggled with accepting, and I am honestly not sure the extent those are prevalent in other traditions even within Mahayana. I know many of them are still part of Zen practice for the priesthood/monks but 90% of my experience and study was Tendai. I have no experience with Theravada traditions and only some with Tibetan, which I know is very esoteric.